Since the millennium, there has been a growing concern for the protection of green space in the Montreal Metropolitan Community (MMC) of Quebec, Canada. Rising populations and development pressures necessitate community driven protection of natural areas. In response, 82 municipalities in the MMC have adopted a planning process for land use, transportation and the environment to guide their sustainable development, including the protection of 17% of existing green space by 2025. Of concern is the lack of provincial norms to ensure the consistency and coordination of conservation priorities across municipalities. We treat a single town, Saint-Lazare, as a test case for the development of a regional framework for the protection of forested land. In addition to field surveys conducted by consulting companies in 2006 and 2011, we characterized forested areas in 2015 so that 77% (1730 ha) of total green space in the municipality has now been evaluated. Taken together, these datasets comprise 22,000 observations on plant diversity across 500 sites, evaluating ecological quality along axes of landscape connectivity, biodiversity, and habitat quality. With these data, we contrast three approaches with low to high municipal participation to identify the forests with the greatest conservation potential. The first approach uses Zonation, a planning tool that produces a hierarchical prioritization of landscape features based on local biodiversity and regional connectivity. For the second method, we ranked forests according to a conservation index assimilating 12 environmental and landscape variables weighted by priorities set by town officials. The third strategy used data gathered from a participatory mapping workshop in which citizens indicated which forests were important to them from a recreational standpoint.
Results/Conclusion
We compare results from these three assessments and show how conservation targets set by ecologists, municipal officials and citizens are not in complete accordance. In our method, forests that score well across three approaches are selected. We demonstrate how this strategy can be applied to multiple municipal contexts in building a standardized conservation framework for the region.